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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Systems Client Experience Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )

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Well, it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means... IBM announcements!

Last week, IBM had a big storage launch of various products, with the June 4 announcements at the IBM Edge 2012 conference. I provided highlights in my post [IBM Edge Announcements]. As promised, here are the rest of the announcements.

SONAS v1.3.2

SONAS v1.3.2 adds support for management by the newly announced IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v5.1 release. Also, IBM now officially supports "Gateway configurations" that have the storage nodes connected to XIV or Storwize v7000 disk systems. These gateway configurations offer new flexible choices and options for our ever-expanding set of clients.

ProtecTIER appliances and gateways

IBM ProtecTIER line of data deduplication appliances and gateways add CIFS file system support. Rather than using OST or a VTL interface, you now have CIFS as a new option for host attach. Also, IBM introduces the new TS7620 Express model, with options for 5.4TB and 11TB in capacity, replacing the previous TS7610 entry level.

LTFS Storage Manager

The Linear Tape File System (LTFS) allows files to be stored on tape cartridges in a manner that allows them to be mounted as file systems, much like a USB memory stick. The new LTFS Storage Manager software allows you to manage a collection of files across a set of cartridges, moving files from one cartridge to another, consolidating valid data onto fewer cartridges, and removing files no longer needed. This is sometimes referred to as "lifecycle management".

Tape System Library Manager

When IBM first introduced the "shuttle" that allowed up to fifteen TS3500 tape libraries to be connected together into a single system, only HPSS customers could take advantage of this. Software was required to coordinate the movement of cartridges from one library to another. The new IBM Tape System Library Manager now offers an alternative to HPSS for coordinating this activity.

DS8000 v6.3 microcode

IBM now offers 400GB solid-state drives. IBM's market leading support for Full Disk Encryption (FDE) is now extended to cover all drive speeds, from the slowest 7200RPM NL-SAS drives up to the fastest solid-state. IBM Easy Tier extends its super-easy implementation to work across all three of these tiers including encryption.

Implementation Services

IBM now offers implementation services for IBM XIV Gen3 storage system, and the N series models 3220 and 3240.

This week I am on the road visiting various clients. Next week, Moscow Russia for the "Edge Comes to You" event!

This week I am in Orlando, Florida for the IBM Edge conference. This is the last day, so it ends early for people who want to get home to their datacenters (er.. families) for the weekend.

How Real-Time Compression Can Maximize Storage Efficiency for Production Applications

This was a split session with two speakers. First, Ian Rimmer, Senior IT Engineer and Architect at iBurst, presented their experience with the IBM Real-Time Compression Appliance in front of NetApp NAS storage arrays. Second, Jerry Haigh, IBM offering manager for IBM System Storage, presented the new Real-Time compression feature announced this week on IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and Storwize V7000.

iBurst is the #1 Wireless Telecom for South Africa. The also offer cable broadband and VOIP. They have 200 employees servicing 120,000 subscriber/households. They need to keep five years' worth of text files, and have chosen real-time compression of their NAS storage. This was before IBM acquired the Storwize company, as they have been using it for the past six years.

The monetary savings from compression was used to purchase Performance Accelerator Modules (PAM) cards for their NetApp NAS gear, which benefit from the compression (more data stored in SSD to improve performance).

For backup, they use NDMP with Symantec NetBackup that keeps data in its compressed form as it is written to tape. They have an IBM TS3100 library with LTO tape as the backup repository.

Jerry Haigh presented Real-Time compression for primary disk data. Unlike the competition, this is designed to be used with primary data, including databases, and does this real-time, not post-process. In some performance tests, DB2 compressed on 48 drives out-performed the same data uncompressed on 96 drives. In another test focused on VMware Vmark benchmark, the compressed data was able to be same or better performance as uncompressed. In a third test with SVC virtualizing XIV running Oracle ORION test, the Oracle databases compressed 50 to 64 percent, and had better performance.

For those who already have SVC or Storwize V7000, consider a 45-day trial to check out compression for yourself.

NAS File Systems: Access and Authentication

Mark Taylor, IBM Technical Specialist for SONAS, N series and Storwize V7000 Unified, presented the nuances of authentication and authorization for NAS file systems. The differences between these two are:

Authentication - Yes, you are who you are.

Authorization - Yes, you are permitted to do what you are trying to do

(Prior to working with SONAS, my only experience with access and authentication in NAS was setting up my LAN at home, which I have connecting my Mac, Linux and Windows machines. I have both N series and SONAS at the IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson, Arizona, so I know first-hand how complicated NAS access and authentication systems can be.
A few months ago, I taught "Intro to NAS" as one of my topics at the Top Gun class in Argentina and Brazil. Several of the students had mentioned they thought they knew NAS solutions but had not realized all the technical issues with access and authentication that I discussed in my presentation.)

Mark explained the differences between Windows NTFS-style System identifiers (SID), versus UNIX-style user and group identifiers (UID, GID). For NAS solutions that support both CIFS and NFS, there are four options:

Local mapping. The dangerous part of local mapping is that the storage admin is also the security admin, and you may want different people doing these roles.

Of these four methods, Mark recommends the first and third as best practices for multi-protocol authentication.

Device

CIFS

Mixed

NFS

N series

NTFS-style

SID-to-UID mapping,UID-to-SID mapping

UNIX-style

SONAS and Storwize V7000

SID-to-UID/GID mapping, NFS v4 ACLs

NFS v4 ACLs

Mark then explained how NFS v4 ACLs work, basically an ordered collection of "Access Control Elements" or ACEs. Each ACE on the ACL may "allow" or "deny" the request. You want to avoid "Inheritance" as that can cause problems and unxpected results.

That's it folks. Next week, I am spending time with my research buddies at the Almaden Research Center near San Jose, California, and then it is off to Moscow, Russia to kick off a series of IBM events called "Edge Comes to You" (ECTY).

The ECTY conferences will be a smaller subset of the Edge conference here in Orlando, but offered in other countries for those who were unable to travel to the United States.

Continuing my coverage of the [IBM System x and System Storage Technical Symposium], I thought I would start with some photos. I took these with cell phone, and without realizing how much it would cost, uploaded them to Flickr at international data roaming rates. Oops!

Here are some of the banners used at the conference. Each break-out session room was outfitted with a "Presentation Briefcase" that had everything a speaker might need, including power plug adapters and dry-erase markers for the whiteboard. What a clever idea!

Here is a recap of the last and final day 3:

Understanding IBM's Storage Encryption Options

Special thanks to Jack Arnold for providing me his deck for this presentation. I presented IBM's leadership in encryption standards, including the [OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol] that allows many software and hardware vendors to interoperate. IBM offers the IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager (TKLM v2) for Windows, Linux, AIX and Solaris operating systems, and the IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager (v1.1) for z/OS.

Encrypting data at rest can be done several ways, by the application at the host server, in a SAN-based switch, or at the storage system itself. I presented how IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, the IBM SAN32B-E4 SAN switch, and various disk and tape devices accomplish this level of protection.

Mike Easterly, IBM Global Field Marketing Manager for IBM System Networking, presented on Network convergence. He wants to emphasize that "Convergence is not just FCoE!" rather it is bringing together FCoE with iSCSI, CIFS, NFS and other Ethernet-based protocols. In his view, "All roads lead to Ethernet!"

There are a lot new standards that didn't exist a few years ago, such as PCI-SIG's Single Root I/O Virtualization [SR-IOV], Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator [VEPA], and [VN-Tag], Data Center Bridging [DCB], Layer-2 Multipath [L2MP], and my favorite: Transparent Interconnect of Lots of Links [TRILL].

Last year, IBM acquired Blade Network Technologies (BNT), which was the company that made IBM BladeCenter's Advanced Management Module (AMM) and BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager (BOFM). BNT also makes Ethernet switches, so it has been merged with IBM's System Storage team, forming the IBM System Storage and Networking team. Most of today's 10GbE is either fiber optic, Direct Attach Copper (DAC) that supports up to 8.5 meter length cables, or 10GBASE-T which provides longer distances of twisted pair. IBM's DS3500 uses 10GBASE-T for its 10GbE iSCSI support.

Last month, IBM announced 40GbE! I missed that one. The IT industry also expects to deliver 100GbE by 2013. For now, these will be used as up-links between other switches, as most servers don't have the capacity to pump this much data through their buses. With 40GbE and 100GbE, it would be hard to ignore Ethernet as the common network standard to drive convergence.

Fibre Channel, such as FCP and FICON, are still the dominant storage networking technology, but this is expected to peak around 2013 and start declining thereafter in favor of iSCSI, NAS and FCoE technologies. Already the enhancements like "Priority-based Flow Control" made to Ethernet to support FCoE have also helped out iSCSI and NAS deployments as well.

The iSCSI protocol is being used with Microsoft Exchange, PXE Boot, Server virtualization hypervisors like VMware and Hyper-V, as well as large Database and OLTP. IBM's SVC, Storwize V7000, XIV, DS5000, DS3500 and N series all support iSCSI.

IBM's [RackSwitch] family of products can help offload traffic at $500 per port, compared to traditional $2000 per port for IBM SAN32B or Cisco Nexus5000 converged top-of-rack switches.

IBM's System Networking strategy has two parts. For Ethernet, offer its own IBM System Networking product line as well as continue its partnership with Juniper Networks. For Fibre Channel and FCoE, continue strategic partnerships with Brocade and Cisco. IBM will lead the industry, help drive open standards to adopt Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), provide flexibility and validate data center networking solutions that work end-to-end.

Every January, we look back into the past as well as look into the future for trends to watch for the upcoming year. Ray Lucchesi of Silverton Consulting has a great post looking back at the [Top 10 storage technologies over the last decade]. I am glad to see that IBM has been involved with and instrumental in all ten technologies.

Looking into the future, Mark Cox of eChannel has an article [Storage Trends to Watch in 2011], based on his interviews with two fellow IBM executives: Steve Wojtowecz, VP of storage software development, and Clod Barrera, distinguished engineer and CTO for storage. Let's review the four key trends:

Cloud Storage and Cloud Computing

No question: Cloud Computing will be the battleground of the IT industry this decade. I am amused by the latest spate of Microsoft commercials where problems are solved with someone saying "...to the cloud". Riding on the coat tails of this is "Cloud Storage", the ability to store data across an Internet Protocol (IP) network, such as 10GbE Ethernet, in support of Cloud Computing applications. Cloud Storage protocols in the running include NFS, CIFS, iSCSI and FCoE.
Mark writes "..vendors who aren't investing in cloud storage solutions will fall behind the curve."

Economic Downturn forces Innovation

The old British adage applies: "Necessity is the mother of invention." The status quo won't do. In these difficult economic times, IT departments are running on constrained budgets and staff. This forces people to evaluate innovative technologies for storage efficiency like real-time compression and data deduplication to make better use of what they currently have. It also is forcing people to take a "good enough" attitude, instead of paying premium prices for best-of-breed they don't really need and can't really afford.

IT Service Management

Companies are getting away from managing individual pieces of IT kit, and are focusing instead on the delivery of information, from the magnetic surface of disk and tape media, to the eyes and ears of the end users. The deployment mix of private, hybrid and public clouds makes this even more important to measure and manage IT as a set of services that are delivered to the business. IT Service Management software can be the glue, helping companies implement ITIL v3 best practices and management disciplines.

Smarter Data Placement

A recent survey by "The Info Pro" analysts indicates that "managing storage growth" is considered more critical than "managing storage costs" or "managing storage complexity".
This tells me that companies are willing to spend a bit extra to deploy a tiered information infrastructure if it will help them manage storage growth, which typically ranges around 40 to 60 percent per year. While I have discussed the concept of "Information Lifecycle Management" (ILM), for the past four years on this blog, I am glad to see it has gone mainstream, helped in part with automated storage tiering features like IBM System Storage Easy Tier feature on the IBM DS8000, SAN Volume Controller and Storwize V7000 disk systems. Not all data is created equal, so the smart placement of data, based on the business value of the information contained, makes a lot of sense.

These trends are influencing what solutions the various different vendors will offer, and will influence what companies purchase and deploy.

Mastering the art of stretching out a week-long event into two weeks' worth of blog posts, I continue my
coverage of the [Data Center 2010 conference], Tuesday afternoon I attended several sessions that focused on technologies for Cloud Computing.

(Note: It appears I need to repeat this. The analyst company that runs this event has kindly asked me not to mention their name on this blog, display any of their logos, mention the names of any of their employees, include photos of any of their analysts, include slides from their presentations, or quote verbatim any of their speech at this conference. This is all done to protect and respect their intellectual property that their members pay for. The pie charts included on this series of posts were rendered by Google Charting tool.)

Converging Storage and Network Fabrics

The analysts presented a set of alternative approaches to consolidating your SAN and LAN fabrics. Here were the choices discussed:

Internet SCSI (iSCSI) - This works on any flavor of Ethernet, is fully routable, and was developed in the 1990s by IBM and Cisco. Most 1GbE and all 10GbE Network Interface Cards (NIC) support TCP Offload Engine (TOE) and "boot from SAN" capability. Native suppot for iSCSI is widely available in most hypervisors and operating systems, including VMware and Windows. DCB Ethernet is not required for iSCSI, but can be helpful. Many customers keep their iSCSI traffic in a separate network (often referred to as an IP SAN) from the rest of their traditional LAN traffic.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) - NFS and CIFS have been around for a long time and work with any flavor of Ethernet. Like iSCSI, DCB is not required but can be helpful. NAS went from being for files only, to be used for email and database, and now is viewed as the easiest deployment for VMware. Vmotion is able to move VM guests from one host to another within the same LAN subnet.

Infiniband or PCI extenders - this approach allows many servers to share fewer number of NICs and HBAs. While Infiniband was limited in distance for its copper cables, recent advances now allow fiber optic cables for 150 meter distances.

Interactive poll of the audience offered some insight on plans to switch from FC/FICON to Ethernet-based storage:

Interactive poll of the audience offered some insight on what portion storage is FCP/FICON attached:

Interactive poll of the audience offered some insight on what portion storage is Ethernet-attached:

Interactive poll of the audience offered some insight on what portion of servers are already using some Ethernet-attached storage:

Each vendor has its own style. HP provides homogeneous solutions, having acquired 3COM and broken off relations with Cisco. Cisco offers tight alliances over closed proprietary solutions, publicly partnering with both EMC and NetApp for storage. IBM offers loose alliances, with IBM-branded solutions from Brocade and BNT, as well as reselling arrangements with Cisco and Juniper. Oracle has focused on Infiniband instead for its appliances.

The analysts predict that IBM will be the first to deliver 40 GbE, from their BNT acquisition. They predict by 2014 that Ethernet approaches (NAS, iSCSI, FCoE) will be the core technology for all but the largest SANs, and that iSCSI and NAS will be more widespread than FCoE. As for cabling, the analysts recommend copper within the rack, but fiber optic between racks. Consider SAN management software, such as IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.

The analysts felt that the biggest inhibitor to merging SAN and LANs will be organizational issues. SAN administrators consider LAN administrators like "Cowboys" undisciplined and unwilling to focus on 24x7 operational availability, redundancy or business continuity. LAN administrators consider SAN administrators as "Luddites" afraid or unwilling to accept FCoE, iSCSI or NAS approaches.

Driving Innovation through Innovation

Mr. Shannon Poulin from Intel presented their advancements in Cloud Computing. Let's start with some facts and predictions:

There are over 2.5 billion photos on Facebook, which runs on 30,000 servers

30 billion videos viewed every month

Nearly all Internet-connected devices are either computers or phones

By 2015:

An additional billion people on the Internet

Cars, televisions, and households will also be connected to the Internet

The world will need 8x more network bandwidth, 12x more storage, and 20x more compute power

To avoid confusion between on-premise and off-premise deployments, Intel defines "private cloud" as "single tenant" and "public cloud" as "multi-tenant". Clouds should be
automated, efficient, simple, secure, and interoperable enough to allow federation of resources across providers. He also felt that Clouds should be "client-aware" so that it know what devices it is talking to, and optimizes the results accordingly. For example, if watching video on a small 320x240 smartphone screen, it makes no sense for the Cloud server to push out 1080p. All devices are going through a connected/disconnected dichotomy. They can do some things while disconnected, but other things only while connected to the Internet or Cloud provider.

An internal Intel task force investigated what it would take to beat MIPS and IBM POWER processors and found that their own Intel chips lacked key functionality. Intel plans to address some of their shortcomings with a new chip called "Sandbridge" sometime next year. They also plan a series of specialized chips that support graphics processing (GPU), network processing (NPU) and so on. He also mentioned Intel released "Tukwilla" earlier this year, the latest version of Itanium chip. HP is the last major company to still use Itanium for their servers.

Shannon wrapped up the talk with a discussion of two Cloud Computing initiatives. The first is [Intel® Cloud Builders], a cross-industry effort to build Cloud infrastructures based on the Intel Xeon chipset. The second is the [Open Data Center Alliance], comprised of leading global IT managers who are working together to define and promote data center requirements for the cloud and beyond.

Fabric-Based Infrastructure

The analysts feel that we need to switch from thinking about "boxes" (servers, storage, networks) to "resources". To this end, they envision a future datacenter where resources are connected to an any-to-any fabric that connects compute, memory, storage, and networking resources as commodities. They feel the current trend towards integrated system stacks is just a marketing ploy by vendors to fatten their wallets. (Ouch!)

A new concept to "disaggregate" caught my attention. When you make cookies, you disaggregate a cup of sugar from the sugar bag, a teaspoon of baking soda from the box, and so on. When you carve a LUN from a disk array, you are disaggregating the storage resources you need for a project. The analysts feel we should be able to do this with servers and network resources as well, so that when you want to deploy a new workload you just disaggregate the bits and pieces in the amounts you actually plan to use and combine them accordingly. IBM calls these combinations "ensembles" of Cloud computing.

Very few workloads require "best-of-breed" technologies. Rather, this new fabric-based infrastructure recognizes the reality that most workloads do not. One thing that IT Data Center operations can learn from Cloud Service Providers is their focus on "good enough" deployment.

This means however that IT professionals will need new skill sets. IT administrators will need to learn a bit of application development, systems integration, and runbook automation. Network adminis need to enter into 12-step programs to stop using Command Line Interfaces (CLI). Server admins need to put down their screwdrivers and focus instead on policy templates.

Whether you deploy private, public or hybrid cloud computing, the benefits are real and worth the changes needed in skill sets and organizational structure.

In his last post in this series, he mentions that the amazingly successful IBM SAN Volume Controller was part of a set of projects:

"IBM was looking for "new horizon" projects to fund at the time, and three such projects were proposed and created the "Storage Software Group". Those three projects became know externally as TPC, (TotalStorage Productivity Center), SanFS (SAN File System - oh how this was just 5 years too early) and SVC (SAN Volume Controller). The fact that two out of the three of them still exist today is actually pretty good. All of these products came out of research, and its a sad state of affairs when research teams are measured against the percentage of the projects they work on, versus those that turn into revenue generating streams."

But this raises the question: Was SAN File System just five years too early?

IBM classifies products into three "horizons"; Horizon-1 for well-established mature products, Horizon-2 was for recently launched products, and Horizon-3 was for emerging business opportunities (EBO). Since I had some involvement with these other projects, I thought I would help fill out some of this history from my perspective.

Back in 2000, IBM executive [Linda Sanford] was in charge of IBM storage business and presented that IBM Research was working on the concept of "Storage Tank" which would hold Petabytes of data accessible to mainframes and distributed servers.

In 2001, I was the lead architect of DFSMS for the IBM z/OS operating system for mainframes, and was asked to be lead architect for the new "Horizon 3" project to be called IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center (TPC), which has since been renamed to IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.

In 2002, I was asked to lead a team to port the "SANfs client" for SAN File System from Linux-x86 over to Linux on System z. How easy or difficult to port any code depends on how well it was written with the intent to be ported, and porting the "proof-of-concept" level code proved a bit too challenging for my team of relative new-hires. Once code written by research scientists is sufficiently complete to demonstrate proof of concept, it should be entirely discarded and written from scratch by professional software engineers that follow proper development and documentation procedures. We reminded management of this, and they decided not to make the necessary investment to add Linux on System z as a supported operating system for SAN file system.

In 2003, IBM launched Productivity Center, SAN File System and SAN Volume Controller. These would be lumped together with Horizon-1 product IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and the four products were promoted together as the inappropriately-named [TotalStorage Open Software Family]. We actually had long meetings debating whether SAN Volume Controller was hardware or software. While it is true that most of the features and functions of SAN Volume Controller is driven by its software, it was never packaged as a software-only offering.

The SAN File System was the productized version of the "Storage Tank" research project. While the SAN Volume Controller used industry standard Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) to allow support of a variety of operating system clients, the SAN File System required an installed "client" that was only available initially on AIX and Linux-x86. In keeping with the "open" concept, an "open source reference client" was made available so that the folks at Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft could port this over to their respective HP-UX, Solaris and Windows operating systems. Not surprisingly, none were willing to voluntarily add yet another file system to their testing efforts.

Barry argues that SANfs was five years ahead of its time. SAN File System tried to bring policy-based management for information, which has been part of DFSMS for z/OS since the 1980s, over to distributed operating systems. The problem is that mainframe people who understand and appreciate the benefits of policy-based management already had it, and non-mainframe couldn't understand the benefits of something they have managed to survive without.

(Every time I see VMware presented as a new or clever idea, I have to remind people that this x86-based hypervisor basically implements the mainframe concept of server virtualization introduced by IBM in the 1970s. IBM is the leading reseller of VMware, and supports other server virtualization solutions including Linux KVM, Xen, Hyper-V and PowerVM.)

To address the various concerns about SAN File System, the proof-of-concept code from IBM Research was withdrawn from marketing, and new fresh code implementing these concepts were integrated into IBM's existing General Parallel File System (GPFS). This software would then be packaged with a server hardware cluster, exporting global file spaces with broad operating system reach. Initially offered as IBM Scale-out File Services (SoFS) service offering, this was later re-packaged as an appliance, the IBM Scale-Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) product, and as IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud (SBSC) cloud storage offering. These now offer clustered NAS storage using the industry standard NFS and CIFS clients that nearly all operating systems already have.

Today, these former Horizon-1 products are now Horizon-2 and Horizon-3. They have evolved. Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, GPFS and SAN Volume Controller are all market leaders in their respective areas.

Continuing on the [IBM Storage Launch of February 9], John Sing has offered to write the following guest post about the [announcement] of IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage [IBM SONAS]. John and I have known each other for a while, traveled the world to work with clients and speak at conferences. He is an Executive IT Consultant on the SONAS team.

IBM’s solution for large enterprise file-based storage requirements, where massive scale in capacity and extreme performance is required, especially for today’s modern analytics-based Competitive Advantage IT applications

Scales to many petabytes of usable storage and billions of files in a single global namespace

Modular commercial-off-the-shelf [COTS] building blocks. I/O, storage, network capacity scale independently of each other. Up to 30 interface nodes and 60 storage nodes, in an IBM General Parallel File System [GPFS]-based cluster. Each 10Gb CEE interface node port is capable of streaming at 900 MB/sec

Files are written in block-sized chunks, striped over as many multiple disk drives in parallel – aggregating throughput on a massive scale (both read and write), as well as providing auto-tuning, auto-balancing

Functionality delivered via one program product, IBM SONAS Software, which provides all of above functions, along with clustered CIFS, NFS v2/v3 with session auto-failover, FTP, high availability, and more

And we’re just scratching the surface. IBM has plans to deploy additional protocols, storage hardware options, and software features.

However, the real question of interest should be, “who really needs that much storage capacity and throughput horsepower?”

The answer may surprise you. IMHO, the answer is: almost any modern enterprise that intends to stay competitive. Hmmm…… Consider this: the reason that IT exists today is no longer to simply save cost (that may have been true 10 years ago). Everyone is reducing cost… but how much competitive advantage is purchased through “let’s cut our IT budget by 10% this year”?

Notice that in today’s world, there are (many) bright people out there, changing our world every day through New Intelligence Competitive Advantage analytics-based IT applications such as real time GPS traffic data, real time energy monitoring and redirection, real time video feed with analytics, text analytics, entity analytics, real time stream computing, image recognition applications, HDTV video on demand, etc. Think of how GPS industry, cell phone / Twitter / Facebook, iPhone and iPad applications, as examples, are creating whole new industries and markets almost overnight.

Then start asking yourself, “What's behind these Competitive Advantage IT applications – as they are the ones that are driving all my storage growth? Why do they need so much storage? What do those applications mean for my storage requirements?”

To be “real-time”, long-held IT paradigms are being broken every day. Things like “data proximity”: we can no longer can extract terabytes of data from production databases and load them to a data warehouse – where’s the “real-time” in that? Instead, today’s modern analytics-based applications demand:

Running against hundreds of terabytes of data of live production data, streaming in from expanding number of smarter sensors, input devices, users

Producing digital image-intensive results that must be programatically sent to an ever increasing number of mobile devices in geographically dispersed storage

Requiring parallel performance levels, that used to be the domain only of High Performance Computing (HPC)

This is a major paradigm shift in storage – and that is the solution and storage capabilities that IBM SONAS is designed to address. And of course, you should be able to save significant cost through the SONAS global virtual file server consolidation and virtualization as well.

Certainly, this topic warrants more discussion. If you found it interesting, contact me, your local IBM Business Partner or IBM Storage rep to discuss Competitive Advantage IT applications and SONAS further.

Well, it's Tuesday again, and that means IBM announcements! Today we had a major launch, with so many products, services and offerings
that I can't fit them all into a single post, so I will split them up into several posts to give the attention they deserve. So, in this
post, I will focus on just the networking gear.

IBM Converged Switch B32

The "Converged" part of this switch refers to Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), which is just a lossless Ethernet that meets certain standards to allow Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) that are still being discussed between Brocade and Cisco. Thankfully, IBM demanded both Brocade and Cisco stick to open agreed-upon standards, and the rest of the world gets to benefit from IBM's leadership in keeping everything as open and non-proprietary as possible.

The B32 ("B" because it was made by Brocade) starts with 24 10Gb Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) ports, and then you can add eight Fibre Channel ports, for a total of 32 ports, hence the name B32. These are designed to be Top-of-Rack (TOR) switches. Basically, instead of having expensive optical cables for Ethernet and/or Fibre Channel out of each server, you have cheap twinax copper cables connecting the server's Converged Network Adapters (CNA) to this TOR switch, and then you can have the 10Gb Ethernet go to your regular Ethernet LAN, and your 8Gbps FC traffic go to your regular FC SAN. In other words, the CNA serves both the role of an Ethernet Network Interface Card (NIC) as well as a Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter (HBA) card.

(You might see 8Gbps Fibre Channel represented as 8/4/2 or 2/4/8, this is just to remind you that these 8Gb FC ports can auto-negotiate down to 2Gbps and 4Gbps legacy hardware, but not 1Gbps. If you are still using 1Gbps FC, you need 4Gpbs SFP transceivers instead, shown often as 1/2/4 or 4/2/1.)

When I present SAN gear to sales reps, I often get the question, "What is the difference between a switch and a director?" My quick and simple answer is that switches have fixed ports, but directors have slots that you can slide in different blades or expansion modules. The Cisco MDS9500 series are directors with slots, the three models provide a hint to their capacity. The last two digits represent the number of total slots, but the first two slots are already taken. In other words, model 9513 has 11 slots, model 9509 has seven slots, and model 9506 has four slots. You can have a 48-port blade in a slot, so in theory, you can have a maximum of 528 ports on the biggest model 9513.

However, if you want FCIP for disaster recovery, or I/O Acceleration (IOA) for remote e-vaulting tape libraries, you need a special 18/4 blade. This has 18 FC ports, four 1GbE ports and a special service processor that speaks FCIP or IOA. If you wanted two service processors for FCIP and two for IOA, you would need four of these blades, and that takes up slots that could have been used for 48-port blades instead. The solution? The new SSN-16 has sixteen 1GbE ports and four service processors, so with one slot, you can handle the FCIP and IOA processing that you previously used four cards, giving you three slots back to use with higher port-density cards.

Even better, you can put this new SSN-16 in the Cisco 9222i. The model 9222i is a "hybrid" switch with 22 fixed ports (18 FC ports, four fixed 1GbE ports, and a service processor, so basically the fixed port version of the 18/4 blade above), but it also has one slot! That one slot can be used for the SSN-16 to give you added FCIP or IOA capability.

The Cisco Nexus 5000 series is Cisco's entry into the Converged Enhanced Ethernet world, although Cisco sometimes refers to this as Data Center Ethernet (DCE), IBM will continue to use CEE when referring to either Brocade and Cisco gear. These are also Top-of-Rack aggregators that support CNA connections over cheaper twinax copper wires. Model 5010 has 10 ports that can be configured for either 1GbE or 10Gb CEE, 10 ports that are 10Gb CEE, and a slot for an expansion module. The Model 5020 has basically twice as much of everything, including two slots instead of one. Since 10Gb Ethernet does not auto-negotiate down to 1GbE, half the ports can be configured to run 1GbE instead. Frankly, that can be seen as wasting your precious Nexus ports with 1GbE connections, so you might find a 1GbE-to-10GbE aggregator that combines a dozen or more 1GbE to a few 10GbE links instead.

Today's announcement is that in addition to 10GbE and 4Gbps FC expansion modules, there is now an expansion module that supports 8Gbps Fibre Channel. Here is the IBM [Press Release].

Whether you choose Brocade or Cisco, nearly all of IBM System Storage disk and tape products can work today with Converged Enhanced Ethernet environments, either directly using iSCSI, NFS or CIFS, or using the FCoE methodology.

As you can see, it took me a whole post just to cover just our networking gear announcements, and I haven't even covered our disk, tape and cloud storage offerings. I'll get to these in later posts.

For the past several years, EMC bloggers have argued, both in comments on this blog, and on their own blogs, that standard benchmarks are useless and should not be used to influence purchase decisions. While we all agree that "your mileage may vary", I find standard benchmarks are useful as part of an overall approach in comparing and selecting which vendors to work with, and which architectures or solution approaches to adopt, and which products or services to deploy. I am glad to see that EMC has finally joined the rest of the planet on this. I find it funny this reversal sounds a lot like their reversal from "Tape is Dead" to "What? We never said tape was dead!"

Impressive CIFS Results

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) has developed a series of NFS benchmarks, the latest, [SPECsfs2008] added support for CIFS. So, on the CIFS side, EMC's benchmarks compare favorably against previous CIFS tests from other vendors.

On the NFS side, however, EMC is still behind Avere, BlueArc, Exanet, and IBM/NetApp. For example, EMC's combination of Celerra gateways in front of V-Max disk systems resulted in 110,621 OPS with overall response time of 2.32 milliseconds. By comparison, the IBM N series N7900 (tested by NetApp under their own brand, FAS6080) was able to do 120,011 OPS with 1.95 msec response time.

Even though Sun invented the NFS protocol in the early 1980s, they take an EMC-like approach against standard benchmarks to measure it. Last year, fellow blogger Bryan Cantrill (Sun) gives his [Eulogy for a Benchmark]. I was going to make points about this, but fellow blogger Mike Eisler (NetApp) [already took care of it]. We can all learn from this. Companies that don't believe in standard benchmarks can either reverse course (as EMC has done), or continue their downhill decline until they are acquired by someone else.

(My condolences to those at Sun getting laid off. Those of you who hire on with IBM can get re-united with your former StorageTek buddies! Back then, StorageTek people left Sun in droves, knowing that Sun didn't understand the mainframe tape marketplace that StorageTek focused on. Likewise, many question how well Oracle will understand Sun's hardware business in servers and storage.)

What's in a Protocol?

Both CIFS and NFS have been around for decades, and comparisons can sometimes sound like religious debates. Traditionally, CIFS was used to share files between Windows systems, and NFS for Linux and UNIX platforms. However, Windows can also handle NFS, while Linux and UNIX systems can use CIFS. If you are using a recent level of VMware, you can use either NFS or CIFS as an alternative to Fibre Channel SAN to store your external disk VMDK files.

The Bigger Picture

There is a significant shift going on from traditional database repositories to unstructured file content. Today, as much as [80 percent of data is unstructured]. Shipments this year are expected to grow 60 percent for file-based storage, and only 15 percent for block-based storage. With the focus on private and public clouds, NAS solutions will be the battleground for 2010.

So, I am glad to see EMC starting to cite standard benchmarks. Hopefully, SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmarks are forthcoming?